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Come together,
right now, over HTML
- Media convergence is all
the buzz, and The Hard News Cafe isn't far behind
By Ted Pease
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The
new Hard News Cafe is USU's answer to the
convergence craze. / Illustration by Leon D'Souza |
July 7, 2004 | When
the Beatles urged us to, "Come together, right
now," they couldn't have known how that song would
play, tooling down the information superhighway.
But it plays very well indeed in 2004, as both people
and technologies are coming together in what media industry
wonks call "convergence."
Convergence refers to the merging of media technologies
into something quite new: Information sources that combine
the best features of newspapers (news in depth, using
text, photos and graphics), TV and radio (immediacy
and impact using visuals, video and sound), and the
powers of computers to mix it all together, plus the
worldwide reach of the Internet to deliver it all instantly
to people's homes and desktops.
For many reasons, convergence is all the buzz among
both media company owners and on university campuses.
Media professionals want to use new communications technologies
to keep up with the changing information needs of consumers.
And journalism/mass communication educators talk about
ways of converging classroom curriculum, to help their
programs and their students to keep up with the changing
needs of media industry employers.
In the news business, convergence is creating new hybrids.
For example, the venerable Chicago Tribune
built a TV news set right in the middle of its newsroom.
And in Florida, the Tampa Tribune and the NBC
affiliate WFLA now share both a new building
and a common newsroom, making news coverage decisions
in teams that include print reporters, broadcasters
and online journalists.
At Utah State University, both technological and pedagogical
convergence occurs right here -- on the pixelated "pages"
of The Hard News Cafe. This student-produced
news website -- an award-winner as the best online student
"newspaper" both in the Intermountain West
and nationally -- is where new communications technologies,
new kinds of audiences for news, and new kinds of student
journalists come together.
If you are reading this, you already know how the Internet
has changed your news and information habits. As U.S.
daily newspaper readership continues to falter and the
number of Americans who say they watch traditional TV
news drops, the Internet increasingly is where we all
come together (from the privacy of our homes) to find
out what's going on in the world.
This change in Americans' information-consumption habits
represents huge challenges to traditional newspapers
and television news organizations. If people can get
instant news from the Web, does that mean the end of
the daily newspaper?
Television has adapted with all-day news programs 24-7,
but even those are slower and less complete than what
you can get through a quick Google search.
At one point not too long ago, some 70 percent of Americans
or more read a newspaper and watched one of the three
network evening newscasts every day. But those numbers
have fallen steadily over the past two decades. ABC
still claims in its promos that its Evening News is
where "more Americans get their news than from
any other source," but that's simply not true anymore.
A 2004 survey by the Newspaper Association of America
found that 68 percent of general Internet users go online
first for breaking news, up from 38 percent just two
years ago. About 40 percent said the Web is a substitute
for reading a newspaper at all.
For those of us who teach, the related concern became
whether traditional journalism education also was a
dying business. If newspapers and TV news operations
need fewer new employees, what careers were we preparing
our students for?
Our answer, in the journalism program at USU, is right
here -- you're looking at it.
The Hard News Cafe represents the convergence
of all of our classes in traditional print journalism,
broadcast TV, photography and graphic design in a new
form.
Far from killing off journalism,
what the Internet and technological convergence have
done is to create new demands, new markets and new audiences
for information. It’s not just old stuff in a
new package, because additional new skills and, especially,
a new way of thinking about news and audiences are required
in delivering information this way.
What we have learned in the six-year process of transforming
what used to be a weekly local newspaper into this constantly
updatable news and information resource is how many
of the old journalistic skills we've always emphasized
for our students are still essential when the news is
delivered online.
Journalists still must know how to gather information,
ask questions and confirm facts, how to write and present
news in a way people can understand, how to help readers
make sense of the world. The same will be true of our
broadcast news students when we add the video packages
to our text, visual and audio product later this year.
Rather than being a threat to journalism, technological
convergence means that now there are more and more varied
kinds of career opportunities out there for people who
can do the kind of work that journalists always have
done.
Our students may not go to work for newspapers or TV
stations when they graduate -- in fact, they probably
won't -- but they will find demand for their skills
in a vastly broader array of companies and organizations
that use information and need to get it out fast and
accurate, in a number of different but interconnected
forms.
That's where we here at The Hard News Cafe
and the global field of communication and information
are coming together. Right now.
-- The writer is head of the department of journalism
and communication, and professor of journalism at Utah
State University.
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